Tag: Glenn Youngkin

The Predictable Post Election Lefty Meltdown

The off-year elections are over, the votes have been counted and in the event Republicans won smashing victories, especially in places where they were supposed to lose convincingly. In Virginia for instance, Republican candidates won their respective races for Governor, Lt Governor and Attorney General. They also regained control of the House of Delegates. 

Predictably enough, lefty hysteria is now in full swing. 

In deep blue New Jersey, Republicans lost the Governor’s race race by a hair even though the polls had the Democratic incumbent, Phil Murphy, up by 8 points. Steve Sweeney, longtime Democratic NJ Senate President was defeated by a political neophyte. Edward Durr, a truck driver who reportedly spent $1,813 on his campaign, apparently beat Sweeney by about 2,000 votes.  

Republicans ran strong races in Pennsylvania as well. The GOP won 3 of 4 elections for seats on the appellate courts, and is on the verge of winning the 4th. In addition they won significant victories in local elections. In fact, they won local elections across the land, for instance in Iowa, Texas, Long Island, and pretty much wherever they ran outside of San Francisco and the Upper West Side of Manhattan. 

When the votes were finally counted, the biggest loser of all was Donald J Trump. The GOP won victories by keeping him at arm’s length; winning back affluent suburban voters turned off by his antics, and running up bigger margins in rural America than he did. 

You would think that Democrats would look at all this with a sense of trepidation and execute a mid-course correction. But you would be wrong. Congressional Democrats are working furiously to pass an even larger version President Biden’s “Build Back Better” monstrosity than they had proposed in their pre-election “framework”. 

That is because the Democratic Party hierarchy, running from reality at the speed of light, has deduced the reason for their widespread electoral defeat. It is The-Racism-That-Stalks-the- Land that the GOP has shamelessly exploited. The right-thinking people who voted Democratic one year ago have (apparently) fallen into the clutches of the Evil Geniuses of the GOP. With their dog whistles and attacks on Critical Race Theory, the GOP (sans Trump no less) has continued its Racist attack on “our democracy”.  

The evidence of Racism is crystal clear: Democrats lost. And if Democrats lose it must be because of Racism. What other possible explanation could there be? Not soaring inflation; not the fiasco in Afghanistan; not soaring crime rates; not the out-of-control southern border; not school closures; not the lefty propaganda taught in grammar schools; not vaccine mandates; not masking mandates; not parents being told to sit down and shut up. 

It must be Racism—the go to progressive excuse for everything. There is history here.

According to the New York Times, Roy Wilkens Executive Secretary of the NAACP, accused Barry Goldwater of “exploiting the Racial Issue” in the 1964 presidential campaign. William F Buckley was a vile racist according to Salon. The evidence? He opposed the Civil Rights agenda in the mid 1960s. (He since said he was wrong to do so). But the point is this: disagreement equals racism in the progressive lexicon. 

Then there is George Will. The Daily Kos, a lefty favorite, ran a piece about him under the subtle headline “George Will is a racist pig.” Not to put too fine a point on it, the next to last sentence reads “George Will is a racist swine”. That’s adult editorial judgement for you. 

Then there was that other well known racist, Ronald Reagan. The Boston Globe ran an opinion column by Renee Graham about him under the headline “Why is anyone surprised by Reagan’s racism?” Democratic Representative William Clay (D-MO) said in Real Clear Politics that Reagan was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf”.

Reagan’s Vice President, and future President George H.W. Bush was obviously a racist as well. 

After all Bush 41 ran the famous Willie Horton ad (picking up the baton after Al Gore attacked Michael Dukakis over Horton in the Democratic primary).  On the occasion of Bush’s death, The Intercept ran a story by Mehdi Hasan under the heading “The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, and Obstruction of Justice”. 

George W. Bush came in for the same treatment. George Soros claimed that Bush 43 displayed the “supremacist ideology of Nazi Germany”. Al Gore said that [Bush] …unleash[ed] squadrons of digital brown shirts to harass and hector any journalist critical of the President”. In 2006, Julian Bond said that “The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side.” See Real Clear Politics.

And of course the latest in the make-believe pantheon of Nazi goons is represented by Glenn Youngkin (Harvard MBA) and Virginians who voted for him. And who also voted (separately) for Winsome Sears, the Lt. Governor elect; a black, female Jamaican immigrant. Winsome, who had served previously in the House of Delegates, earned a BA in Economics from Old Dominion University and an MA in Organizational Leadership from Regent University. 

The winner for Attorney General was Republican Jason S. Miyares. A graduate of James Madison University and William and Mary Law School, he unseated the 2 term Democratic incumbent Mark Herring. Mr. Miyares, a Latino, was born in North Carolina, where his parents settled after escaping Cuba’s Castro.  

It just goes to show how devious those Republican racists can be. In Virginia, they nominated highly educated, quality candidates.  Out of three candidates for constitutional executive office, two were minorities themselves. And they ran first rate campaigns. And they talked about the issues the voters cared about. And they made a persuasive case for why they would be the better choice for their respective offices. 

Dastardly. 

Democrats will do all they can to put an end to that type of campaign. After all, treating people as individuals rather than as statistical abstractions; using persuasion instead of name calling, distancing themselves from the King of Mar-a-Lago, and treating voters with respect represents a threat to…shall we call it Democratic Supremacy?

JFB

All Eyes on Virginia

Election Day (surely a misnomer with early voting)  is this Tuesday and all eyes are on Virginia’s gubernatorial race. As they should be. The contest, between Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin, may help to clarify two important political questions and one structural question. 

Terry McAuliffe

First, can the Republican Party move beyond its embrace of Donald J. Trump and thrive as a modern organizing vehicle for conservative fusionism? Second, can the Democratic Party abandon progressivism and return to pragmatic liberalism? Third, and most important, will policymaking continue to be dominated by bureaucratic rule-making, or will it allow for increased freedom of choice?

First, the political questions. When the race began, McAuliffe was considered to be a shoo-in. Over the last 10 years or so Virginia migrated from being reliably red to purple with a decided blue tinge. Since 2002 Virginia, which does not permit its governors to serve consecutive terms, has had 5 Chief Executives, 4 of whom were Democrats. The current Governor, who survived a black-face scandal, is a liberal Democrat. The two legislative bodies flipped from Republican to Democratic in 2019 for the first time since 1994. President Biden won the state by 10 points in 2020. 

Glenn Youngkin

Needless to say, candidate McAuliffe is running hard against—Donald Trump—who in Virginia is only slightly more popular than the Unabomber. Not a day goes by where McAuliffe doesn’t rail against Trump and then argue that Republican Youngkin is simply a Trump acolyte. 

For his part, Youngkin has carefully tried to thread the needle. He needs Trump voters, but he also needs to create space between himself and Trump in order to win back upscale suburban voters who abandoned Republicans in droves in 2018 and 2020. Consequently he has focused on state and local issues with occasional rhetorical shots at the lunatic fringe that increasingly dominates the national Democratic Party. 

In this he has been greatly helped by none other than the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe. In answering a question about local schools—a topic that has generated considerable heat in Virginia (and elsewhere)—McAuliffe voiced an opinion that stunned a lot of political observers. He said “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

This remark added fuel to the fire that had already been raging for months over the public schools in Northern Virginia. There have been contentious school board hearings, petitions and recalls in the counties surrounding Washington DC over school curricula, admission standards for magnet schools, Critical Race Theory, masking of school children and school closings due to COVID-19.   

Bear in mind a couple of relevant facts. The first thing to note is that the four Virginia counties surrounding the District are among the wealthiest, best educated and bluest in the country. They are prime territory for Democratic vote seekers. And those counties appear to be in revolt. The second is that parents began to realize what has been going on in the public schools when they looked at their children’s Zoom screens and saw how their children were being proselytized. And the parents didn’t like it one bit. 

A third factor that needs to be taken into account is that McAuliffe is just plain wrong when it comes to parental rights with respect to the education of their children. The Code of Virginia is quite clear about this. The Code §1—240.1 entitled Rights of Parents reads as follows:

“A parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education and care of the parent’s child.”

All of which points to the central element of the race. Candidate Glenn Youngkin says “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.” Candidate McAuliffe says that he thinks parents should keep out of it and let the professionals—i.e., the teachers unions—run the show. This despite the fact that the law of the Commonwealth, quoted above, is quite clear that the decision-making authority over a child’s education fundamentally resides with the parents. And, not to put too fine a point on it, progressives have made hash out of pretty much everything they have run. 

Government by experts rather than the protection of rights has been the battle cry of progressives from the time of Woodrow Wilson until the present day. This inevitably makes government an interested rather than a neutral party in the application of the law. Which in turn ultimately brings about the destruction of Liberalism, the rule of law, and liberty, only to be replaced by the soft (and later not-so-soft) authoritarianism of bureaucratic command-and-control.  

The choice in Virginia’s gubernatorial race is clear. On the one hand there is Youngkin, who represents the messy business of  democratic governance designed to protect rights and expand the range of citizen choice. On the other hand there is McAuliffe, the iron fist in the velvet glove, who represents the bureaucratic interests of government at the expense of citizen choice.   

When the votes are counted on election day, mine will be among those for Glenn Youngkin. 

JFB